Tachikawa Disaster Base and Life Safety Learning Center: A Guide

If the Prime Minister’s Office is knocked out, Japan’s disaster command moves to Tachikawa. Next door, a free center lets you feel an earthquake. Why here?

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

If the Prime Minister’s Office can no longer be used, where does Japan’s disaster command go? The Cabinet Office’s answer is short. First, the Prime Minister’s Office. Second, the Cabinet Office. Third, the Ministry of Defense. And if none of these can be used: Tachikawa.

You take a bus from the North Exit of Tachikawa Station, in western Tokyo, and get off in a district next to Showa Kinen Park. There, within walking distance of one another, are gathered the national government, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, the police, the fire service, the Self-Defense Forces (Japan’s military), a hospital and, for some reason, the Japan Coast Guard. It is called the Tachikawa Wide-Area Disaster Prevention Base. If an earthquake directly beneath the capital wiped out the nerve centre of central Tokyo, the national disaster headquarters is to be set up in a building here.

Right next door is a place where children pose for photos in firefighters’ uniforms and adults flinch as the floor shakes beneath them: the Tokyo Fire Department’s Tachikawa Life Safety Learning Center, known in Japanese as Tachikawa Bōsaikan (立川防災館, “Tachikawa Disaster Prevention Hall”). Admission is free.

But why Tachikawa? Seen from central Tokyo, it is just one city in the middle of the Tama area, the broad western part of Tokyo beyond the 23 central wards. If you wanted somewhere to keep the capital’s spare brain, you’d think there would be any number of other candidates. With that question in hand, I start by walking into the building anyone can enter.

Tachikawa Life Safety Learning Center: what you can try and how to get there

The center’s formal name is the Tokyo Fire Department Tachikawa Citizens’ Disaster Prevention Education Center. Its address is 1156-1 Izumicho, Tachikawa. According to the Tokyo Fire Department, you take a bus from stop No. 1 at the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station and get off at “Tachikawa Shōbōsho” (Tachikawa Fire Station); the center is right in front of you. From Takamatsu Station on the Tama Monorail it is about a 15-minute walk.

As the bus-stop name suggests, the building shares a site with Tachikawa Fire Station. On the Cabinet Office’s site plan, this is the Tokyo Fire Department’s Tachikawa Joint Government Building, a single block bringing together the 8th Fire District Headquarters, the Tama Command Center, Tachikawa Fire Station and the learning center, and it counts as part of the Tachikawa Wide-Area Disaster Prevention Base. In other words, visiting the learning center is itself a step inside the base.

The Tokyo Fire Department runs three such centers in Tokyo: Ikebukuro, Honjo and Tachikawa. The first two are in the 23 wards, which makes Tachikawa the only place in the Tama area where you can have this kind of experience.

It is open from 9:00 to 17:00. It closes on Thursdays and the third Friday of the month, and over the New Year holiday; when a closing day falls on a public holiday, the following weekday is the closing day instead. But there are three days when it opens whatever the day of the week: 1 September, Disaster Prevention Day; 1 October, Tokyo Citizens’ Day; and 17 January, Disaster Prevention and Volunteer Day. On the anniversary of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of 1995, the doors are open even if it is a Thursday. The weight of that date outranks the closing-day rules.

There is a small knack to enjoying the center. The hands-on corners are run as guided tours by instructors. On weekdays you can choose up to four, and on weekends, holidays and during the summer holidays up to three. Each corner takes about 30 minutes. Morning sessions start every 30 minutes from 9:15, and afternoon sessions every 30 minutes from 13:15. The official site stresses that holidays and the summer holidays are especially busy. Even private groups of ten or more must book in advance; online bookings open up to five months ahead, on the same date, and close seven days before your visit.

Among the notices, there was one sentence I read twice: “Persons who have been drinking will be refused entry.” You can’t let people who are tipsy and unsteady on their feet into a place where you experience earthquake tremors. The logic is clear. It’s clear, and yet the fact that it had to be written down makes me think of how many izakaya (Japanese pubs) light up the streets of this town.

So what does a sober visitor experience inside?

Shaking, smoke, fire extinguishers, and a firefighter’s uniform

On the ground floor are a mini disaster-prevention theatre, an earthquake room and a smoke room.

The earthquake room is for ages three and up. According to the official description, it is a place to experience a realistic earthquake and learn how frightening earthquakes are, how to prepare day to day, and how to act when the moment comes. For children of elementary-school age and younger the intensity is limited, and very small children cannot take part. A ramp means wheelchair users can join in too. Tools for rescuing someone trapped under furniture are also introduced.

The earthquake corner was renovated and reopened on 20 March 2026. The Tokyo Fire Department lists five improvements in the new corner: you can learn about earthquake measures for apartment buildings; it uses manga in its presentation; it is easier for foreign residents to understand; it is easy for wheelchair users; and you learn about disaster prevention on three screens. If you live in an apartment, you’ll probably find yourself imagining how your own rooms would shake.

I confess that the bookshelf in my room is still not fastened to the wall. As I read the description of the earthquake room, that bookshelf fell over in my head several times. The learning center makes people repent before they even arrive.

The smoke room has no age limit. In a room filled with smoke, you learn how to escape safely without being overcome. The official site describes it as a place to acquire correct knowledge and evacuation methods and to cultivate calm judgement and decisive action. With your vision cut off, you stay low and feel your way along the wall to find the exit. It is a room for learning that movement with your feet rather than your head.

Upstairs on the first floor (the second floor, in Japanese counting), the experiences become more practical. The rescue corner, for junior high school students and up, is a realistic reconstruction of an earthquake-hit scene, where you go from searching for people trapped inside to rescuing them. There are rooms modelled on a bedroom and an office. The firefighting room, for third-graders and up, has you putting out a fire projected on a large screen with a simulated extinguisher. Company in-house fire brigades can even train with a real indoor fire hydrant. The first-aid room, for fourth-graders and up, uses training mannequins to teach chest compressions and how to use an AED.

There is a VR disaster experience too, for second-graders and up who are at least 100 centimetres tall. In a virtual space you can experience earthquakes, fires, and storm and flood damage with a strong sense of realism. The height limit is like a ride at an amusement park. Only what waits for you is not the screams of a sudden drop but a town slowly sinking under water.

The corners you can explore freely are well stocked as well. On the ground floor, the “Children’s Disaster Experience Plaza” has a survival quiz, disaster-prevention actions to learn with your body, and a corner called “Turn into a firefighter!” Upstairs there is a corner for practising 119 emergency calls (Japan’s number for fire and ambulance) and a fire-helicopter game. While the children puff out their chests in firefighters’ uniforms, their parents stand beside them, trying to remember where the fire extinguisher is at home. That, I imagine, is the kind of place it is.

Step out of the learning center, and another vast world spreads out in front of you. This is not just a cluster of fire-service buildings. It is a corner of a base that holds the nation’s reserve command centre. Where did that base come from? The story goes back more than a hundred years.

1922: an airfield and a hospital born in the same year

Trace the history of the Tachikawa Wide-Area Disaster Prevention Base and you inevitably begin with Tachikawa Airfield. Other articles in this series cover the airfield’s history, so I’ll keep it short here. According to Tachikawa City, the Imperial Japanese Army’s 5th Air Battalion moved to Tachikawa in November 1922. According to the Cabinet Office’s chronology, in September 1945 the Allied forces, that is, the US military, requisitioned the site and used it as an air force airfield.

What surprised me was the history of the hospital inside the base. According to the history of the National Hospital Organization Disaster Medical Center, it began on 30 November 1922, when it was founded as a medical facility attached to the army’s air units. In April 1923 it became Tachikawa Army Hospital. After the war, in December 1945, it started afresh as the National Tachikawa Hospital, and on 1 July 1995 it merged with the National Oji Hospital and was reborn on its present site as the National Hospital Tokyo Disaster Medical Center. Since 2004 it has carried its current name, National Hospital Organization Disaster Medical Center.

November 1922 is the very month the army’s 5th Air Battalion moved to Tachikawa. The aircraft and the hospital that protected the bodies of the people who flew them were born on this land in the same month of the same year. Over the following hundred-odd years, the aircraft changed owners, from the Japanese military to the US military to disaster-response helicopters, and the hospital changed form, from army hospital to national hospital to disaster-medicine hospital. But the pairing of guarding the sky and guarding the body has never once left this land.

Today’s Disaster Medical Center is a large hospital with 455 beds on a site of 40,664 square metres. Its website calls it Tokyo’s core disaster base hospital and says it sends staff to large-scale disasters in Japan and abroad. A hospital born to serve army air units is now one of the pillars of disaster medicine in Japan.

How, then, did the vast base around that hospital become land for disaster prevention?

453 hectares returned, and the “two pillars”

Before the land was returned, it is worth recalling the sounds of this plateau. According to the Machi Archives, a local-history series by Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Realty, when the Korean War broke out in 1950, Tachikawa Base became the US military’s biggest transport base in the Far East. Business with American servicemen boosted the town, but aircraft noise became a problem. Under 1960, the city’s chronology records: “Soundproofed building of Municipal No. 1 Elementary School completed.” The sky was such that a school needed soundproofing. According to Tachikawa City, that sky only fell quiet after October 1969, when the US military announced it would stop flying at Tachikawa.

Today the Ground Self-Defense Force uses the same runway. According to the city, flights normally take place on weekdays from 8:00 to 20:00, with an average of about 50 take-offs and landings a day. As a rule there are no training flights on weekends or public holidays. On the days of entrance exams, the pilots try to avoid flying over the exam venues. Back then, children rode out the roar of transport planes in soundproofed classrooms. Now it is the people doing the flying who are looking out for the exam candidates.

I follow what happened to that quieter plateau through the Cabinet Office’s chronology.

In April 1973, the national government consulted the Central Council on National Property about how to use the land once Tachikawa’s airfield was returned. In November 1977 the airfield was returned in full. The national land returned at that point came to 453 hectares, or 466 hectares including earlier returns. That much land, within walking distance of the station, came back all at once. According to the city’s chronology, in 1976, the year before the return, a “Citizens’ Rally Against the Paid Three-Way Division of the Tachikawa Base Site” was held. Residents did not simply sit and wait for the land to come back.

What to do with that much land? On 19 November 1979 the council delivered its report. According to the Cabinet Office, it laid down guidelines with “a large-scale park and a wide-area disaster prevention base as two pillars,” taking into account the wishes of the agencies concerned and the excellent location, with land around them set aside for the healthy growth of the local town. One pillar became Showa Kinen Park (the Showa Memorial Park), a national government park. The other pillar was the Tachikawa Wide-Area Disaster Prevention Base.

Things moved quickly after that. In May 1983, Japan’s Central Disaster Management Council decided to push ahead with developing the base. In October that year, Showa Kinen Park opened. In December a liaison council of the national government, the agencies involved and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government was formed, and in August 1984 they agreed on the “Outline of the Construction Plan for the Tachikawa Wide-Area Disaster Prevention Base.”

The park and the disaster base are twins, born of the same report. While families spread out their lunches on the lawn at weekends, the other sibling stands silently ready for an earthquake that could come at any time. The Cabinet Office lists among the base’s advantages a large site where the park, too, can be used for gathering supplies temporarily and for looking after disaster victims. In an emergency, the twins are meant to join hands.

The base covered 115.69 hectares, according to Cabinet Office material from March 2010. The breakdown is interesting. The largest share is Self-Defense Force aviation facilities, at 84.46 hectares. Then come police disaster facilities at 11.36 hectares, medical facilities at 4.08, maritime disaster facilities at 3.52, and housing for disaster staff at 3.48. Fire and disaster facilities take 3.20 hectares, food storage 2.52, local disaster facilities and others 1.53, and a radio tower 0.10. And the Tachikawa Joint Government Building for Disaster Management, which houses the national disaster headquarters’ reserve facility, takes 1.44 hectares. The capital’s spare brain fits into just over one hundredth of the whole base. Brains, as a rule, are small for the size of the body.

The Numbers: Tachikawa Wide-Area Disaster Prevention Base

• 115.69 hectares — the base’s total area in the Cabinet Office’s 2010 material. Try walking all the way round and you’ll probably regret it.
• About 30 kilometres — the distance from central Tokyo. Not too far, not too near: unlikely to be hit at the same time, but close enough to rush in.
• About 500 people, one week — the reserve facility’s capacity according to the 2001 White Paper on Disaster Management: staff summoned here can work for a week at this number.
• 4th — Tachikawa’s place in the order of locations for the national emergency disaster headquarters, after the Prime Minister’s Office, the Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Defense.
• 36 million yen — the national government’s settled spending on developing the base in fiscal 2009 (per the 2011 White Paper on Disaster Management). The upkeep bill, for one year, of the capital’s spare brain.
• About 5,900 pallets — the capacity of the Tokyo government warehouse inside the base. What it was originally built to store is the subject of our quiz.

Wanderer’s Quiz

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Tama Wide-Area Disaster Prevention Warehouse stands inside the base. What did the national government originally build it to store?

• A. Rice stockpiles
• B. Aircraft parts
• C. US military supplies

The answer comes near the end of this article.

The skeleton of the base was in place. But what kind of building is the “spare brain” at its centre, and how is it supposed to work?